Secret Isaac (16 page)

The king ordered up flowers from the hotel. Roses they were, pink, white, and yellow. The flowers had a perfume that made the donkey sneeze. Dermott was cross with him. “Will you recover from that fit? I need a man in a clean suit.”

They took a cab out to Donnybrook, the roses in Annie's lap, and Dermott married her inside the Church of the Sacred Heart, with Jamey as a witness before God, the organist, two ushers, and the wedding priest. Jesus, couldn't you ask a girl if she was in the marrying mood? Dermott gave her a wedding ring that she wasn't supposed to wear. A silver band it was. She had to hide it in her pocketbook. “I don't want the Fisherman to know about us,” he said. “It's a secret, understand?”

So Dermott's bride had to stay Annie Powell. It made no difference at the hotel. She was
madam
to the porters, whatever name she carried. They did have a wedding feast. Dermott booked a restaurant around the corner on Molesworth Place. You wouldn't have noticed this restaurant from the street. It didn't have much of a sign. You had to knock on the door to get in. A woman shook your hand in the vestibule. “Mr. Dermott Bride,” Jamey said. “Party of three.” It wasn't a restaurant where you had to eat on the ground floor, with the dampness sticking to your shoes. Annie climbed a flight of stairs to a dining room with six tables. Her man had reserved them all.

Jamey tinkered with his soup. The light from the candle fluttered on his jaw. There was a darkness between the two men. The donkey's jaw began to move. “Did you settle with the Fisherman?”

“I did.”

“Well, am I to be banished or not?”

“Yes and no,” her man said. “Our accounts are a disaster, Jamey. You'll go to New York and help my uncle Martin. He blunders when he's on his own … then you'll come live with us.”

Jamey's eyes seemed to close inside his head. The candle couldn't reach into them. He had already shut himself off from Dermott.

“Ah, it's a grand country New York is. Perfect for little James. After all, murder is me business.”

“Have you forgotten?” Dermott asked. “We're at a wedding party.”

“Sorry, Derm. I'll finish my soup.”

The donkey left in the morning. The porters carrying his luggage were like dwarfs around O'Toole. He had to stoop in the Shelbourne to kiss Annie's forehead goodbye. One lip went into her ear. “I'll wallop you, Annie girl, if you strut on O'Connell Bridge.” Her man rode with him to the airport. She wasn't invited to come along.

It was lonely without O'Toole. Two of the Fisherman's people moved in with them. Then another two. Now it was Dermott, Annie, and four old men. They were careful with Dermott. They didn't get in his way. But he couldn't walk Annie through St. Stephen's without these old men. A woman she was, married and all, though she wasn't allowed to say it, and she had chaperones, four, with yellow teeth. It was bad enough living with them when her man was there. Then Dermott had to go to Ameriky for a little trip. “Close a few accounts,” he said. “Give me the chance to have a pint with Jamey. A week,” he said. “No more.”

But he didn't come back in a week, and Annie had to survive with Coote's people surrounding her. Their cigars stank up Dermott's suite. Porters shuffled in and out of the rooms with sandwiches and jars of warm black piss that could have been scooped out from the boiling mud at the bottom of the Liffey. They were proud watchdogs, these old men. They loved to shadow Annie in the streets. It took up half her energies and the slyness in her head to shake the old men. She'd stroll into Gaiety Green, a shopping mall on West Street, try on a pair of boots, crawl behind a rack of dresses, and slip out into an alley near Cuffe Lane. They couldn't catch up with her, for all their yellow teeth. Then she'd turn corners and end up at Bewley's Oriental Cafe. She wouldn't sit downstairs and be served by waitresses who scratched your order on a pad and made you eat lemon tarts when you'd asked for scones. Annie went up a flight to the paupers' station, where you had to serve yourself. Oh, it was crowded in that room, and you were obliged to share your table with companies of strange men: if you didn't hold your elbows tight, you'd have the dregs of Dublin in your lap.

But a man protected her, cleared a space for Annie at the table, so she could chew her scones in peace. An American he was, a college instructor in a tattered raincoat and a crumpled hat, come to Dublin on a small grant. He was doing research on a gentleman called Jonathan Swift.

“Are you interviewing that man Swift?” Annie said.

The instructor laughed. “No, he's long dead. He wrote about a giant in the land of little people,
Gulliver's Travels.
”

“I remember that book,” Annie said. “The little people captured him. I would have bashed Gulliver, you know, when he was all wrapped up in thread.” Annie grew quiet. Here she was with a wedding ring in her pocket. She didn't want the instructor to think she was a frivolous girl. She lied a bit. “My man's a professor too. He studies Mr. Faulkner and Mr. James Joyce.”

“Where does he teach?”

“He's unemployed at the moment … but he doesn't really need a job. He's rich. He buys up castles and turns them into hotels.”

The instructor's name was Gerald, Gerald Charwin. She saw that hungry look in his eyes. What should Annie do if a man was smitten with her? She could meet him by accident, sit and have her scones, but she wouldn't make an appointment with Gerald. He was waiting for her at Bewley's the next day, around three o'clock. He told her scraps of Irish history. There was a river under Dublin, he said. The Poddle.

“I don't believe it.”

His man, Jonathan Swift, used to wade in the Poddle.

“Gerald, does the Poddle ever seep up when the weather is bad? Imagine a city drowning in the river under its streets.”

But Gerald wouldn't encourage her. “The Poddle doesn't go very far. It follows the line of Little Ship Street. Dublin will never drown in it.”

He would have liked to take her walking over the channels where the Poddle still flowed. They could touch the pavements, he said, and listen for the sound of water. It was only a block from where he lived. Annie was dying to
feel
the Poddle, touch an underground river with her feet, but she had to refuse. Suppose the watchdogs found them together on Little Ship Street? What would the old men think?

She stuck to Bewley's Cafe with Gerald Charwin. But she couldn't escape the old men. It took one more sit-down with Gerald to bring them into Bewley's. They hovered over the tables with their yellow teeth, sniffing peas, sausages, and chips. You would have figured they were the quiet type, angels off the street, harmless uncles of Annie Powell, looking for a meal of peas. They wore old men's sweaters and caps. They kept muttering, “Fine day,” to people at the tables. “Nice, nice.” They slouched behind Gerald, the four of them.

“Would you come downstairs with us, laddie? We'd love to have a word with you.”

“He's nothing to me,” Annie said. “Just a man in a cafe. We talk about rivers a lot. Leave him alone.”

They seized Gerald by the arms, lifted him out of his chair, and banged him from table to table, excusing themselves as they did. “Sorry now … eat your peas and don't mind us.”

They pushed him down the stairs and carried him out of Bewley's and into the street, with Annie pummeling their old men's backs. “Don't you hurt him,” she said. “He's a scholar. He's reviving Mr. Jonathan Swift.”

They ignored the girl. The old men stepped on Gerald's hat, punched him in the kidneys and the ribs, dropped him into the gutters of Grafton Street. It was over in a minute. The Fisherman's people knew how and where to punch a man without calling notice to themselves. Annie couldn't help Gerald out of the gutters. The old men caught her by the sleeves and shoved her quietly towards the hotel. “Fancy,” they said, mocking her with tongues in the middle of yellow teeth. “The king's girl goes to Irish coffeehouses with a scholar boy. It's footsies under the table for Annie Powell. She's the clever one. She can love a boy without taking off an article of clothes.”

“Shut your stupid mouths,” she said. “Dermott will make you pay for what you did to Gerald.”

They tittered under their old men's caps. “It's Gerald, is it? There's a level of intimacy, if you ask me. Don't torment us, Annie Powell. The king will knock you silly for playing with your Geralds.”

They couldn't keep her locked in a hotel. The watchdogs grew dumb when it came to following her in the street. She could snake in and out of an alley before they had the chance to catch their breath. She wouldn't crawl back to Bewley's. Annie was ashamed. How could she tell Gerald that her man was a gangster who happened to love James Joyce and had four old idiots to punch your kidneys out of shape for the crime of having a cup of coffee with Annie Powell?

She disappeared into the pubs of Duke Street. The Bailey, or that other one across the road, with awnings in the windows. It made her laugh. Because the Bailey had stolen the door right out of Mr. Leopold Bloom's house on Eccles Street. It exhibited the door in its own parlor. The door had an Egyptian knocker on it. She could surprise her man. Annie understood a thing or two about Mr. James Joyce. The Bailey, the Bailey, and Leopold Bloom. A tourist attraction it was. Come sip your Irish coffee with Leopold's front door. The pub was deep enough for Annie Powell. She could hide in there, against the sunlight off the windows. Bailey's would get crowded close to five. Young executives from Dame Street would come piling in for their jars and pints and glasses of vodka and pink gin, and they nearly drove Annie off her bench with their smooth bodies and starched cuffs. They were a friendly lot. They would ply her with the best Irish whiskey and stick their hands under her skirts. Annie didn't bother with their names. It could have been Jack or Mick or Frenchy Pete. She would go home with none of them. At half ten Annie said goodbye and hobbled from door to door until she got to her hotel.

That was Dublin without the king. Afternoons at the Bailey, running from Coote's old men, while the lads from Duke Street tickled her thighs with the cuff links they wore. She guzzled Jameson's whiskey, drank herself into a terrible fog. Then, one night, with Mick or Frenchy Pete laying an elbow in her skirts, she looked up, because it was time to go, and she saw her man inside the Bailey. Dermott it was. The king himself. His eyes were dark, and she would have warned Mick or Pete, whoever it was, but the lad was busy solving the different layers of Annie's underwear. The king didn't rush that lad. He had too much dignity to destroy a pub. He waited for Annie to fix her skirts and get up from the bench. He'd never punish her in the Bailey, not her man. She would have liked to point out Leopold's door. Bloom, Bloom at the Bailey, but she was too drunk to raise her arm. “Derm,” she muttered into the wall, “why don't you buy that fucking door and take it home with us.”

She didn't remember much after that. Dermott must have gotten her to the Shelbourne. She was lying in bed. The king sat next to her. She could feel his shivering leg. She was too embarrassed to stare at him with both her eyes. Her man had shadows on his face, as if the cheeks had been pulled out of him and he was left with hollows under his nose.

Oh, Annie heard the knife, the kiss of an opening blade. She didn't move her head off the pillow when that slash arrived. The strokes were very harsh. They hurt like Jesus, but she wouldn't moan or scream. She bit her tongue from all that pain. She would have tolerated it,
loved
the cut in her cheek, if Dermott had only stayed with her, nursed his wicked Anne. But Dermott went into another room. It was the old men who jumped about with the gauze and the cotton. They looked at her with open mouths. “Mother of God!” That was the comfort she had. Bands of yellow teeth. Coote's old men became her nannies. They dressed and undressed the bandages she had to wear. The king was on another trip.

They fed her soup, the Fisherman's people. They wouldn't let a porter near Annie Powell. When the bandages came off, they stuck a mirror up to her face. Annie knew without any mirror. The king hadn't cut her in a mad, purposeless fit. Drunk she was that night. In a stupor. But she was alive to him. She felt every turn of his wrist. He'd given her his own design. She'd wear Dermott's name on her cheek for the rest of her life.

Snow White she was, with a scar on her to spoil her complexion … and four benevolent dwarfs. They swept and did her laundry in the sink. They stood around her bed, waving a funny ticket at her. “You're going to Ameriky.”

“Where's my man?”

“Well, the king, he's indisposed. He can't see you off. But he did pay for the ticket.”

They took her to the airport, sat with her until it was time to get on the plane. They had their knuckles in their eyes. They were sniffling when they put those knuckles down. They were the same old men who had punched Gerald outside Bewley's. They could be so mean and so nice.

“Forgive us, Annie dear.”

“There's nothing to forgive.”

“We led the king to Duke Street. We thought he'd slap you a bit. We didn't figure on the knife.”

“That's Dermott's way,” she said. She kissed the hands and mouths of these old crooks who had mended her, and she went off to Ameriky.

Someone met her on the other side of the ocean. Martin McBride. He winced at the sight of her, but he didn't say a word. They wouldn't let her starve in Manhattan, no, no, no. The uncle had an apartment for her and a cash allowance. “Annie, you'll never have to work again.”

She told the uncle to stuff himself. “Dermott can keep that apartment for his next lady. I owe him five thousand dollars and I intend to pay it off. I'm not his personal cow.”

Martin shrugged. “Five thousand?”